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Biography
Tobias Lütke is CEO and co-founder of Shopify, the marquee shopping cart system of the e-commerce industry. As a programmer, Tobi has served on the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created many popular open source libraries such as the Typo weblog engine, Liquid, and Active Merchant. He owns nearly 7% of Shopify, which went public in 2015.
In 2004, Tobias Lütke launched Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop from his garage with his partners, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake. Lütke, a programmer by trade, had decided to build his own e-commerce platform in Ruby on Rails. Soon after, the Snowdevil founders decided to shift their focus from snowboards to e-commerce, and Shopify, the e-commerce platform, was officially launched in 2006. In 2012, Profit included Lütke on its “The Fabulous 30” list. The Globe and Mail named Lütke “CEO of the Year” in November 2014. By September 2016, more than 300,000 merchants utilized Shopify and over $20 billion worth of gross merchandise sales on the company’s platforms since 2006.
Lütke grew up in Germany, where he learned to code by age 12 and left school at 16 to enter a computer programming apprenticeship. He began developing the e-commerce platform after he and a friend tried to open an online snowboard shop, but couldn’t find decent software.
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